If you work in a high pressure environment (and I include looking after your own children or a sick relative or any environment stressful and sometimes unpredictable) you can find yourself having to change your position on the 'assertiveness continuum' (that is, where you find yourself behaviourally on the line between aggressive behaviour and passive behaviour) many times a day.
The kind of environments we're talking about here are mostly day-to-day social environments but they can be 'situational' - a car crash may change the contextual nature of you as a passive passenger one minute to you as an aggressive life-saver the next - it's all a question of context.
We can see assertiveness as a 'dance' between 3 balancing acts.
Balancing Act 1: Our Aggressiveness versus Our Passiveness
Imagine a line (or a see-saw) between the two extremes on a continuum and your job is to move between them - remaining mostly near the centre.
First, let's address the myth of it being wrong to be aggressive or it being wrong to be passive - if a grown man pokes me in the eye (which has happened) I want the right to shout and chase him around a bit (which also happened). Whereas if a child pokes me in the eye I would wish to be passive (feeling my pain passively - what an understanding hero, eh? - it's not happened yet but you never know).
Whilst aggressive and passive are extremes of the assertiveness 'continuum' let's not assume they're no-no's. Those extremes are there for a reason. We don't have to remain in the centre of the assertiveness continuum all the time, we just have to gravitate towards it as much as possible in order to ensure everyone's treating each other with due mutual respect.
What we want to be sure of though is wherever we are between those two extremes we're in the right place at the right time. Am I right? If you're moving through your day seeing all kinds of different people and dealing with different situations - how do you keep track of whether or not you're in the 'right place' behaviourally speaking? Let's take a look at 3 scenarios:
Scenario 1 - Your Child and the Cooker Ring
Your youngest child has a habit of putting their hand on the front cooker ring (they can't see it - they just love to slap their little hand on there to find out if it's on yet by feeling the thing) - one day they go to do it and you shout 'no!' and they jump back startled - were you wrong to do that? Were you being a bit too aggressive?
Scenario 2 - Your Adult Son Wants to be a Toilet Cleaner
Your oldest child, a 25 year old, has told you they're changing their job from graphic artist to toilet attendant. You start to give them a talk on how this will affect them and you get annoyed when they tell you, politely, it's none of your business. Are you wrong to insist that it is?
Scenario 3 - Your Bosses Want to Blame You
Your line manager reprimands you for failing to control the behaviour of a higher level manager after said manager has ignored your reports to them about falling productivity - now that manager is accusing you of failing to provide the information and your line manager seems to be playing along with the idea and you're being set up for a disciplinary.
Each scenario has questions to answer but before we start answering them let's take a look at Balancing Act 2.
Balancing Act 2: Our Rights versus Our Responsibilities
Your rights and responsibilities must be matched in order for you to be able to act assertively effectively. One of the single biggest motivation killers in any situation is having responsibilities but no matching rights. You must give yourself the right to refuse those responsibilities for which you have not been given matching rights.
Let's take another look at those 3 scenarios above and apply this rule (my take, anyway):
Scenario 1: You have a responsibility to keep your child safe and alive and to match this you must have the right to shout urgent warnings - even if it means aggressively 'shocking' the child. Weigh up the shock of a shout compared to the shock of a hand placed on a hot cooker ring.
Scenario 2: You don't have a responsibility for providing for your adult child or for directing their career - you therefore have no rights in this regard. I recommend you support your adult child with their crazy decisions if you want to keep the relationship balanced.
Scenario 3: If your responsibility was to provide reports to the manager and you met this responsibility you have succeeded and there is no grounds for action to be taken against you by anyone. Weigh up your rights in this situation - do you have the right to discipline the more senior manager for not paying attention to your reports?
This leads us to Balancing Act 3.
Balancing Act 3: Balancing Our Behaviour with Our Social Roles
Our rights and responsibilities are different according to our environments and it can be quite a balancing act.
If you socialise with work colleagues are you with friends or are you still at work? If you employ or are employed by your children how does that impact on your working and family life? If someone you trained to be as good as you are at a particular task suddenly becomes your supervisor how do your behaviours need to shift? If you go to a wedding and socialise with people you cannot stand how do you balance things?
Despite all the complexity most of us get the 3 Balancing Acts right most of the time without thinking about it - but there are times when we would benefit from sitting down and thinking about what is really going on around us. This kind of thing is usually triggered by a 'hold on a minute ...' moment.
Applying Assertiveness Systematically
Applying any approach 'systematically' means you are working with a cyclical, rhythmic approach in regards to a chosen life area. There are five main elements to consider when working on any life area in this way:
- The Environment
- Desirable Outputs and Outcomes in relation to that environment
- The Inputs you will need to achieve those Desirable Outputs and Outcomes
- What Processes and Activities you will apply to the inputs available
- What Feedback you need to pay attention to in order to effectively assess whether or not you are achieving or can achieve the desired goals (outputs and outcomes).
For your viewing pleasure here are two YouTube videos I thought you might find of interest:
This video gives 10 'assertiveness-passiveness' scenarios:
httpv://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=Ymm86c6DAF4
This chap provides a good explanation of what assertiveness is all about (his body language is a bit strong - I remember I used to flap my hands around like that when I was talking to people).
Regards.
Carl
httpv://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=HKgNI6ztYIo
